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International Law for a Time of Monsters: ‘White Genocide’, The Limits of Liberal Legalism, and the Reclamation of Utopia

Loefflad, Eric (2022) International Law for a Time of Monsters: ‘White Genocide’, The Limits of Liberal Legalism, and the Reclamation of Utopia. Law and Critique, 35 (1). pp. 191-212. ISSN 0957-8536. (doi:10.1007/s10978-022-09337-y) (KAR id:99372)

Abstract

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a discrete group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/s10978-022-09337-y
Uncontrolled keywords: Genocide, Race, Far-Right, Jurisprudence, International Law, Utopia
Subjects: K Law
K Law > K Law (General)
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Funders: University of Kent (https://ror.org/00xkeyj56)
Depositing User: Eric Loefflad
Date Deposited: 07 Mar 2023 11:05 UTC
Last Modified: 29 Apr 2024 10:56 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/99372 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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